The Pursuit of Global Political Justice, or, What’s Global Democracy For?

Abstract

Some recent treatments of cosmopolitan democracy have focused on the feasibility of actually achieving global political justice, or a defensibly participatory form of shared rule at the global level. Commentators have explored whether there are decisive reasons to think that binding global democracy would be impossible to achieve, and if it is not impossible, the means by which both global institutions and a global demos might be constructed (List and Koenig-Archibugi 2010; Koenig-Archibugi 2012a). For clues, they have looked to the historical development of domestic liberal democracy (Goodin 2010), as well as to more recent transitions to democracy within states (Koenig-Archibugi 2011), and to potential ‘paths and agents’ to global democracy that are emerging in the current global system (Held and Archibugi 2011). Each of these investigations has offered important insights into which lessons from domestic democratic transitions might be transposed upward, adding an important empirical element to the mostly normative and prescriptive literature on global democracy and global political justice.